A cell is an autopoetic system - it has its individuality, which it maintains by its internal processes relating its various parts and this defines life. Existence is life. According to Franciso Varela - this is a necessary and sufficient condition - but a stone or inanimate object exists and continues to exist without having any flow of matter or energy. The answer to this is that if you break a stone into small parts, the individual parts of the stone still exist, but if you break a cell, its individual parts cease to exist because their existence was dependent on their mutual relationship - their organization. Hence the struggle for life - the various parts of a cell form a set of operational processes between them, which is information, which helps them to operate together to keep their organization alive.
If we look at a macro level, in business world organizations behave similarly to the cell organization - they have departments (akin to organs) which have their specific function and each employee (akin to a cell) who have their specific roles all related to each other through processes. Life is a team game - our groupings at a macro level mimic what they are at a cellular level, which constitutes us.
The individual cells or even the organelles within a cell, may not be conscious of the life of the system which they constitute and may want to exploit each other for their own sustenance, but in the process they put the existence of the entire system at risk.
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